Peter Hagen
Page 1
2/5/2016
Ghostwriting Autobiographies: Academic Advising and the Humanities
Peter L. Hagen, Ph.D.
Keynote address
New Jersey Advising Conference
June 15, 2006
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
--Yeats, “Among School Children” (1927)
Introduction
Lately, the National Academic Advising Association has been paying a great deal
of attention to the ways in which academic advising can be linked to other academic
activities, such as teaching, learning, theory building, researching, and publication. The
NACADA leadership rightly surmise that strengthening our ties to the other central
processes in academe will make our position stronger with the decision-makers in
academe—like provosts and deans, you know, the people we report to. So within the last
several years we have seen a number of NACADA initiatives that the membership have
responded warmly to, like:
1. The creation of a graduate certificate program in academic advising at
Kansas State University. This is an important first step toward a fully
realized graduate degree in academic advising. They currently have
about 300 students enrolled nationwide.
Peter Hagen
Page 2
2/5/2016
2. A marked improvement in the number and quality of proposals to the
research committee, and a continuing increase in the total dollar amount
awarded for research in academic advising.
3. An increase in the number and scholarly quality of articles sent to the
NACADA Journal. In years gone by, the editors used to have to fill in the
pages with lots of book reviews. Now, there’s no room for book reviews
anymore because there are so many scholarly articles—they put the book
reviews on the web.
4. A task force charged with writing a strong statement called “The Concept
of Academic Advising” to help us define what we are and what we do to
provosts, deans, and the faculty. Given that the audience of that position
paper is comprised of our fellow academics, it comes as no surprise that
the authors seek to show the similarities between advising and teaching.
In fact, these days you can now get a bumper sticker from NACADA that
says “Advising is Teaching.”
I agree with those in NACADA who think that one of the best things we can do
for the field of academic advising is to look at the ways we can link our activities to all of
the other central processes in academe: teaching, yes, but also learning, research, and
theorizing. The people that judge us and who hold our existence in their hands—faculty,
deans, provosts—are academics. Our stock as a profession rises or falls with how those
other academics value our academic pursuits: our research, our scholarship, our learning,
our teaching, and yes, our advising. This is true whether you are a full-time professional
adviser, or a faculty member who advises.
Peter Hagen
Page 3
2/5/2016
I’ve been involved in some of these NACADA projects because of my interest in
advising theory. So for me, given my interest in advising theory, an important question
is: “What role should the theoretical foundations of other disciplines play in the
formation of academic advising theory?” Well, you need to be careful about what I have
already smuggled into this talk without having first explained it. For starters, what is
theory? We can best think of theory not as a vessel that will wholly contain the thing we
wish to examine, but rather as a lens with which to view it.
For the field of academic advising, I maintain that there can and should be not one
lens, but many, through which to scrutinize advising--theories and perspectives from the
arts, the humanities, and the social sciences at a minimum, and maybe others as well.
Better? Worse? Same? It’s like being in the optometrist’s office. You have to
try out a few lenses before you find one that lets you see clearly what you want to see.
Indeed, I claim that it is highly unlikely that we will be able to build any sort of
useful theory statements in academic advising without the help of a wide range of theory
from other fields. I make this claim because I know what you know: academic advising
is not a simple activity that anybody with half a brain and a college catalog can do. Yes,
we need student development theory; yes, we need counseling theory; yes, we need
educational theory; but yes, we also need theory from the humanities, from fields like
communication, philosophy, literature, and history.
The humanities have evolved out of truly ancient, long drawn-out struggles to
find truth, goodness, and beauty, and to comprehend the nature of knowledge itself. In
the humanities, we use some of the most basic tools humans have at their disposal:
imagination and interpretation. If advising is to flourish as a field of scholarly inquiry
Peter Hagen
Page 4
2/5/2016
and improve as a field of practice, then we need to connect it with these ancient traditions
of scholarly inquiry. Why? Because as advisers, we are also concerned with these
ancient and noble goals: truth, goodness, beauty, knowledge. Our tools are also
imagination and interpretation.
The second point that I have already smuggled in without your prior consent was
to assume that advising theory is necessary. “I mean, come on, I don’t need to know
about theory in order to do advising, do I?” Well, yes, you do. In fact even to say that
you don’t need theory is to already have a theory of advising. We all do our advising
from some theoretical stance. The more we can become aware of it the better off we’ll
be. To the extent that we can not only become aware of it but also write about it and
publish it to others, to that extent we become better practitioners and scholars of
academic advising. And collectively, our advising is likely to be valued more by other
academics.
So let’s do some theorizing together. What I’d like to do in this talk is to spend
some time with you reminding you of what you already know: that you are yourself a
theorist of academic advising. I also want to show you how you can theorize by
borrowing theory from the humanities. I hope to prove the assertion that excellence in
academic advising has a lot to do with humanistic perspectives like literature, philosophy,
communication studies, and history. To be more specific, I claim that you as advisers are
already well-versed in the modes of learning and discourse practiced by those fields,
things like narrative, criticism, epistemology, and hermeneutics. Let me translate that last
sentence. I’m saying that you are already well-versed in telling and hearing stories,
making judgments, thinking about the nature of knowledge, and in interpreting.
Peter Hagen
Page 5
2/5/2016
Narrative Theory
Let’s take a closer look at narrative, for example. In his work Human
Communication as Narration (1987) Walter Fisher argues that humans are essentially
storytellers. In fact, he says we should define our species that way—“homo narrans.”
Well, you and I know, that’s just another way to say that humans tell lies. “Don’t tell me
a story, tell me the truth,” we’ve all heard our mothers say to us at one time or another.
But now that we’re all grown up, we know that back when the vase got broken we were
operating—as Walter Fisher does—from a relative conception of truth. Nowadays we
could argue back to our mothers and say, “But ma, the absolute truth is not possible even
under the best of circumstances. All we have is relative truth, truth that depends on the
contexts of history, culture, biography, and character; truth that varies by situation, genre,
and medium of communication. The dog broke the vase.” Would she be convinced? At
any rate, in a world where our conception of truth is relative—the real world we live in—
a narrative approach to human communication is very useful. We make sense of the
world, Fisher argues, through stories that are internally coherent and that “ring true” with
other stories.1 If one adopts a narratological point of view, one sees the world as a set of
stories among which we make choices. We live our lives as a process of continual
creation and enactment of stories.
There is some truth to this. Fisher’s account is coherent and rings true, to my ears
at least. We go through life telling and hearing stories; we enact them and reenact them;
we create them and suppress them. They constitute the whole of our lives. Even a
1
Adapted from Walter R. Fisher, Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason,
Value, and Action (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987), pp. 64-65.
Peter Hagen
Page 6
2/5/2016
keynote address has to be coherent and ring true. It is a story of sorts, is it not? A
retelling of some other experience—like some research done in a musky library, or
thoughts measured out in coffee spoons. Even the most mundane activities and
interpersonal communications are parts of stories.
“I have this student,” your colleague from down the hall says to you, “and he
signed up for Calculus but he got a D minus in Precalc.” It may be just one sentence, but
it’s a story plain and simple and it rings true to us as a story because it sounds like other
stories we have heard. But the events in the story don’t cohere with each other and that’s
the problem being related. The adviser is going to have to explain later to the student
how his action of signing up for Calc with a D minus in Precalc doesn’t lead to a happy
ending. The adviser will likely use a story to tell that student why the action doesn’t
resonate with other narratives: “I’ve seen dozens of students fail Calculus when they had
anything less than a C in Precalculus. Drop the course.” By saying this to the student,
the adviser is using other stories to demonstrate why the current story is incoherent.
But let’s push this narrative idea a little further. In the fields of literature,
philosophy, and history, the relationship between the author of a narrative and its reader
(or listener) is very important. I wish to point to a book by Seymour Chatman called
Story and Discourse (1978),2 one of the most coherent statements on the structure of
narratives I’ve encountered.
Chatman makes a clear distinction between the real author of a narrative and what
he calls the “implied” author. He says that the implied author is a person invented by the
reader. We readers don’t really know the author of a text, we only know the author that
2
Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1978.
Peter Hagen
Page 7
2/5/2016
we infer from the words of the text. Charles Dickens is in a very real sense a character
that you and I invent when we read his works. Yes, indeed, there was a real Charles
Dickens, but it almost doesn’t matter. “But,” you object, “what about when we can ask
authors of poems or novels or songs just exactly what they meant? What if they are still
alive?” Well, yes, but even then, all you really have is another implied author and
another text. Suppose we had Sir Paul McCartney right here with us and we could ask
him once and for all what the words to “Blackbird” mean. How do we know if we can
trust him? Does he really know what the song means? Now that he’s 64, can we be sure
that he would remember the true meaning? Knowing him, he’d probably say “Well, it’s
just a song, isn’t it? Decide for yourself.” Whenever we read a text, hear a narrative, or
just hold a conversation with someone, we never really know that person at all, we create
that person out of the narratives they speak to us.
Do you recognize the chaos that this brings to the practice of advising? Not come
to know the actual student before us? Of course we come to know the student before
us—how else could we advise? Maybe this narrative stuff isn’t worth much after all.
But, when you think about it, which student do we come to know? The real student, or
the implied one; the one who slumps in the chair before us, or the one we construct from
the stories that are told to us? Well, you see where I’m headed. Just as you are inferring
me at this moment, so do we infer students from the narratives that the flesh-and-blood
“real” students present to us. And they do the same thing to us, right there in our offices.
They tell us their stories. We listen and use that most useful tool we possess—our
imagination—to imagine what it must be like to be that student. It may be true that we
only have the implied author available to us but we really are trying to get to and
Peter Hagen
Page 8
2/5/2016
influence the real author underneath that baseball cap or those dreadlocks or that pink
hair.
If their story is not coherent, we question them. “Wait a minute,” we say,
“Earlier you said that you hated your experience as a summer camp counselor and now
you’re saying that you want to major in education?” We question them because we know
how that story goes—you sign up to major in education thinking it’s a secure job and
figuring you can put up with anything for 20 years, but then you discover you hate
working with kids, so you’re miserable for 20 years, and then you find you can’t retire
that early anyway, so you lock the golden handcuffs on for another 10 years and finally
retire hating your job, your students, the principal, the board of education, and the
taxpayers, too. We do what we can to save the student before us from that story and
stories like it from other fields.
If their story doesn’t resonate with other stories, we question them. “Hold on,”
we say, “you mean to say that you are in the honors college but you are headed for
straight F’s this semester?” This is a narrative that doesn’t ring true with other narratives,
so we stop the student at that point and demand that the telling of the story take another
turn so that a more faithful narrative—one that makes more sense—can take place. You
all know the types of plots that can unfold at that point: “my parents are getting a
divorce,” “I’ll never become a doctor like my older brother,” “I just turned 21 and I go
out every night,” “I got a B on an exam—it was my first B—so I just stopped caring.”
And isn’t it the case that one of the most important ways we have to persuade
students to take the right path is also to tell stories? As advisers we use stories to teach,
warn, recommend, admonish, exhort, and praise our students. How often have you
Peter Hagen
Page 9
2/5/2016
illustrated a point you wish to make by telling the student before you some anecdote from
your own life? Like the story of how I got my first F on my first mid-term exam as a first
semester freshman in Biology 101. As a lived event, that F was cataclysmic. But as a
narrative, I’ve used it dozens of times to help my students understand and deal with their
first failure.
And while we’re at it, isn’t it the case that the best way we advisers have to train
one another is through stories? You can know the rules backwards and forwards, but
until you’ve seen how they can pertain to some sample cases, you don’t fully understand
how to advise. We store our most important advising principles, the unwritten ones, in
stories. As a new adviser, did you not find yourself telling stories to your mentor, stories
that invariably began “I have this student who. . . .” You told the story because you had a
student whose situation troubled you because the student’s situation did not ring true with
respect to other narratives (such as all the other students you had worked with up to that
point).
But in order to guide you down the proper path as a newbie adviser and illustrate
the path you should take, your mentor may have told you a story that began, “I had this
student who. . . .” I claim that the locus of our most important and effective training of
advisers takes place in the stories we tell to one another.
“I had this student who. . .”—that’s the adviser’s equivalent to “Once upon a
time.”
In general, the key thing to remember about applying Chatman’s work to advising
is that we and the students with whom we meet are both “authors” and “readers” at the
Peter Hagen
Page 10
2/5/2016
same time. Each is a text to the other. What do you think at this point: are you a literary
critic or not?
It’s what scholars in the humanities do all the time: they judge other people’s
narratives and, in turn, are judged by their own narratives. My point so far is that this is
what happens in academic advising as well: we judge our students by their narratives and
they judge us by ours.
If you regard this as a fruitful analogy, then it means that you can use accepted
theory that already exists in the humanities to make meaningful statements about
academic advising. This can be an exhilarating process if you regard the humanities as
your academic home, as I do. But the thing is—the same can be done in the arts, the
social sciences, and maybe even the sciences as well. Building advising theory on
foundations that are already established in other fields: this is one of the ways that we can
connect advising with the other central processes in academe.
But now, back to our story already in progress. . . .
Ghostwriting Autobiographies
How far can we go with this narrative thing? Well, let me take it just one step
further and we can get on with the conference. Try this on for size. One of the most
important things we do is to ghostwrite autobiographies of lives that are still in progress.
In this regard, we’re a lot like Alex Haley, who is the one who really wrote The
Autobiography of Malcolm X. Students are writing the story of their lives, and we get to
help them. Is there a better job on the planet? Think about it: we experience students as
we would experience a text. We interview them and hear their stories. Interpretation!
But then, and here’s the best part: we get to help them sketch out a plot line for the whole
Peter Hagen
Page 11
2/5/2016
book and we get to help them write the next chapter. Imagination! What qualifies us to
do this? How do we get away with it? How can we possibly prepare for this?
Let’s get specific. What gives you the right to be an adviser if you have not
majored in English? How can you overcome this severe shortcoming in your education?
For starters, get comfortable with narratives. In order to help students craft their
own autobiographies, we need to know about all the stories and narrative elements that
are out there in the culture already. I claim that as advisers we draw upon the narratives
in our culture and further that in order to do so still more effectively, we must build our
storehouse of stories to the extent possible.
Toward that end, our training agenda should include the reading of literature,
philosophy, and history, and the viewing of worthy films. How can a person claim to be
a good adviser who has not read Hamlet and King Lear or seen Rashamon? Okay, you’re
right, I probably should stop trying to smuggle stuff into this speech. It really doesn’t
matter what films you see and what books you read. But as an adviser—and this is
especially true for those advisers who work with undecided students—an indispensable
part of your training is to augment your storehouse of narratives. How can we ghostwrite
other people’s autobiographies if we haven’t experienced a lot of other narratives?
Conclusion
In this presentation, I am not meaning to suggest that narrative theory is the only
theory upon which academic advising theory should be based. And I don’t claim that
English is really the best major to qualify one to be an academic adviser. That honor
goes to Theatre, of course. I do, however, claim that narrative theory and other
Peter Hagen
Page 12
2/5/2016
humanistic approaches to knowledge can inform advising theory and can enrich our
practice of advising. The ideological lenses of the humanities can serve us well in
advising.
So how do we view academic advising through the ideological lenses of the
humanities? It means that we adopt the same attitude toward the student before us that
we do when we read literature or listen to a symphony. It must be done with humility
(for we cannot presume to already know the “text” before us), with imagination, and with
caring. For me, to advise is essentially to engage reverently in imaginative discourse
with a student, to help that student discover her/his most deeply held principles and to
help that student live and make choices according to those principles, co-creating with
her/him an education that is a faithful embodiment of the grand narrative of the
curriculum and yet fits cogently with the rest of that student’s own life stories.
Our tools are those of the humanities: imagination and interpretation. These
tools are inherently flawed but they’re the best we have. How do we know when we have
the right interpretation? How do we know that we have given the student good advice?
“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the
dance?” says Yeats in his poem “Among School Children.” Well, we can’t, of course,
but if we adopt a stance of humility and reverence toward the student —the same stance
we use to interpret a difficult text—we can get close.
I want to close with a quote from William James that highlights the unavoidable
problems involved with interpreting other people, and the need to be humble. It’s from
an essay called “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.”3
In William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on some of Life’s Ideals, New York:
Norton, 1958
3
Peter Hagen
Page 13
2/5/2016
“Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any
single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the
peculiar position in which he stands” (p. 169).
As advisers, our job is to learn to see in spite of our limitations, our blindness.
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see.
So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.